First impressions, sound is really good. Very clear with a good punch. Bass response seems good. Playing some Daft Punk on it now which has a great groove to it and it sounds pretty nice. I haven't done an A and B comparison between this and my Topping AX-1 USB DAC to see the difference but for a portable device, it sounds great. I added a 3.5 line out cable to my car stereo and can now play all my hi-res FLAC files through it without needing to burn them to a DVD-Audio. I'm listening to Heart is A Drum by Beck right now which sounds incredible. I really hope there will be DSD support for this as the more formats supported, merrier.
The unit itself is pretty nice. It's not as big as I thought it might be. It's not jean pocket portable but height wise it's no bigger than an iPhone 4s. The triangle shape is odd but I get the reasoning for that. The little trap door on the bottom for the MicroSD card is not a great design. I've had to use a pen tip to get it open. If I could've made a suggestion, I like forward and backward scrolling buttons. I know that's gen 1 iPod stuff but I like that better than having to turn on the unit to move a song forward or back as the sleep feature puts the screen to sleep with 5 minutes of inactivity. That can be changed but it's a small gripe. It would've been better to make the screen wake sensitive by touch.
The GUI is not bad. It's very basic. You toggle at the top with a finger tap or swipe to get artists, albums, songs, playlists or settings. You can select the album, artist or song by tapping on them and then either it loads the albums or songs. Another tap accesses the songs.
Now for the bad and it's really bad. The Pono Music World app is bad. I doubt I'll ever use it other than to purchase songs. It is very clunky. Unlike iTunes, you cannot tell it what specific music to load on your player. It took me about 3 hours to figure out how to get the MicroSD card to be viewable and writable on my Mac. The only way I figured it out was thanks to another Pono user who had a solution. I then just opened the card and dropped some of my hi-res folders into the card. The problem is it goes through the player and that is synched with USB 2.0. I may get a 128GB card with a SD reader option since my Mac has a SD reader slot. I loaded about 12 albums which took over 2 hours. I ended up just letting it process while I went to bed. Only having 64GB internal storage and a 64 GB card is a problem. I have over 180GB of hi res music so I guess a bigger card needs to be ordered. In general and I know this is a Beta and a Kickstarter but you're pretty much left on your own to figure this out. For instance, when you sync the player, Pono Music World tells you it is going to install a firmware update. It doesn't tell you how long this will take and to get the firmware to update you have to eject the player from your computer (similar to an iPod) and then disconnect the player from the USB cable. Only then will it install the firmware and this was after it told me the firmware loader had failed. Yet it still loaded the firmware. There's little things that needed to be fixed and improved. The sync module in general is really bad since it took me about 20 tries to get the SD card to be recognized hence why I just ditched the sync software and just drag and dropped folders into the desktop SD card icon. Things like gapless playback on the player need to be added.
Overall, I'm happy with it so far. I doubt it catches on with the mass public but it's not a bad option for audiophiles. I'm sure there will be better players brought along but if this pushes the tech and creates possibly better mastering of music then I'm all for it. For now, I'm just happy I can take high quality music with me on the go.
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